Melissa Wiley's Blog, page 155
October 18, 2010
Anna's Muffin Skills Would Be Nice, Too
Dawn reviews Carney's House Party and Winona's Pony Cart at She Is Too Fond of Books:
The Foreword, by Melissa Wiley, looks at character development and assesses how Wiley herself has been impacted by these books. She says that she hopes her daughters "will become … the heroines of their own lives, facing life's challenges with Carney's integrity, Betsy's determination, and Winona's sense of fun."
Related: Carney and Winona are in the building
Tweet
October 15, 2010
I Do Love a Good PT
We're having an October that feels like a proper October–which is to say, like an East Coast autumn, with lovely brisk weather. It's not a typical San Diego October, which is usually a crispy month here, not a crisp one. Santa Anas gusting hot and dry. Wildfires. Brown lawns. Jack-o-lanterns turning to mush on the front stoop. I think October is the one month of the year when the rest of the country has us beat in the weather department.
I haven't heard much Halloween chatter around the house yet. Rose mentioned it once, morosely, having just realized that she won't be able to eat most of her favorite kinds of candy this year because of the braces. She did say she wants to dress up as Bast, the Egyptian goddess, this year. Beanie hasn't decided yet. I haven't decided what kind of candy I'm buying yet: my big Halloween decision.
Speaking of Egyptian mythology: Rick Riordan's The Red Pyramid went over well with my three oldest. As did his new book, The Lost Hero, which hit the stores on Tuesday (same day as Carney, Winona, and Emily) and hit my kids' eager hands about ten minutes later. The girls enjoyed watching Rick's livecast on release day. He's such an engaging speaker.
My CYBILs reading continues apace—though my tally lags way behind many of my fellow panelists, some of whom have already read 25 or 30 books. Or even more! Amazing. Today's the last day to nominate titles, if you haven't yet. Sherry made some suggestions for my category, YA fiction, if you're stumped.
All sorts of delicious reading going on around here these days. I'm trying to keep a list of picture books and other stories I read to Rilla and Wonderboy. In the past week, more or less:
Shark vs. Train
Miss Suzy
Madeleine
Bedtime for Frances
Miss Nelson Is Missing
The Moon Jumpers
and yesterday we started My Father's Dragon
That's all I can remember right now.
Easier to remember: Rilla's latest series of drawings. Shark. Unicornshark. Catshark. (That last one's a princess. Obviously.)
She slipped me a little note yesterday: orange crayon, block letters. COM TO MY TEA PT. So that's where I'll be this morning, if you're looking for me.
Tweet
October 13, 2010
October 12, 2010
Tuesday Teaser: Why I Love Carney
A very small taste of what I had to say about Caroline Sibley, aka Carney, in the foreword to HarperPerennial's scrumptious new double-volume edition of Carney's House Party and Winona's Pony Cart:
At times her present seems maddeningly full of unanswerable questions—Larry Humphreys is coming for a visit! Will they click, after all these years? What if they don't? And what is she to make of that happy-go-lucky Sam Hutchinson, who zooms around town unshaven in his Locomobile, recklessly lavishing generosity upon his friends and then, horror of horrors, telling shopkeepers to "put it on the book"? Carney faces each question with frankness and interest, even in painful circumstances. It's that combination of honesty and enthusiasm that makes Carney one of Lovelace's most likable characters. She's a real girl, rapidly becoming a real woman: a woman with integrity and vision, who doesn't look to others to solve her problems for her, but instead faces them head-on, confident in her own ability to untangle muddled thinking.
Oh, I just love her. There's lots more—when I get started talking about Carney (and Winona! and Betsy!) it's hard to stop.
Tweet
October 11, 2010
Carney and Winona Are In the Building!
Okay, you know you get a lot of books when an entire box arrives—a box you've been waiting for with a thrill in your heart—and you miss it. Don't ask me how it happened. It seems Carney, Winona, and Emily landed in the Bonny Glen days ago, and I wasn't waiting at the station to greet them.
Well, here they are. Could they be any swoonier? No, they could not.
Maud Hart Lovelace's "Deep Valley" companion novels: Emily of Deep Valley, with a new foreword by acclaimed author Mitali Perkins, and (in one volume) Carney's House Party and Winona's Pony Cart, with a foreword by me. Both books contain, in the back, photos and biographical information about Maud Hart Lovelace and (for the first time ever) illustrator Vera Neville by Betsy-Tacy experts Julie Schrader, Amy Dolnik, and Theresa Gibson. That's Vera's classic art you see on the covers.
Appearing on the shelves October 12th! As in: tomorrow!
Have you signed up for the Maud Hart Lovelace reading challenge yet?
Not sure on where Carney, Emily, and Winona fit into the Betsy-Tacy series? Here's a walkthrough.
Tweet
October 7, 2010
Attention Twin Cities Folks!
Heather Vogel Frederick, author of the Mother-Daughter Book Club series, will be appearing at the Red Balloon Bookshop in Saint Paul to sign copies of her new book, Pies and Prejudice.
"Right before the start of freshman year, Emma moves unexpectedly to England with her family. Her book club friends are stunned. Thanks to video-conferencing, the resourceful girls keep the club alive, and choose Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice as their next book. While reading Austen, the girls deal with exciting and not-so-exciting developments in their daily lives. When the girls try to bring Emma home by starting a bake sale, a thriving business is born: Pies and Prejudice. The plan they cook up, however, falls short, and they wonder whether the book club will ever be together again. With facts about Jane Austen and quotes at the beginning of the chapters to help draw parallels between significant characters in Pies and Prejudice and those in Pride and Prejudice, Pies and Prejudice is a fitting introduction to the literature of Jane Austen."
7pm on October 11th. Visit this site for all the details and spread the word to your Twin Cities friends. I wish I could go! Besides being a terrific writer and Austen enthusiast, Heather Vogel Frederick happens to be as big a Betsy-Tacy fangirl as I am…in the words of the esteemed Kathy Baxter, "she knows what color apple blossoms are!"
I'll be making a Minnesota trip myself in a couple of weeks for Kidlit Con 2010. I wish the timing had been just a little different—I would have loved to be in Mankato for the Betsy-Tacy Society's Carney/Winona/Emily book launch party next week, and I'd have loved to visit the Red Balloon to meet Heather! Go ahead, make me jealous!
Tweet
October 6, 2010
Books We Love #I've Lost Count
Some days are Miss Suzy days. (When you're a four-year-old girl, pretty much every day is a Miss Suzy day.) Today is gray and drizzly, a rarity for us here in sunny SoCal. Especially in October, which I've been recalibrated (after four years here) to think of as That Baking Hot Month When It's All About the Santa Anas. Wildfire month. But not today. Today is chilly, blankety weather. I was tempted to call off the older kids' morning activity, just so I wouldn't have to venture out from under the quilt. But I didn't. Out we went, and home we came, and the baby went down for an early nap, and Rilla and Wonderboy and I cuddled up to visit Miss Suzy.
When I open its pages, I'm swept again with the same wave of love I felt as a small girl. Oh how I adore Miss Suzy's house. The firefly lamps, the moss rug, the acorn cups. Please can't I live there? I feel now exactly as I did at age—I don't know, four? five? six? When did I encounter this book? Who read it to me?
Those horrible red squirrels. I remember how sick I felt the first time I turned the page and saw that awful squirrel cracking Miss Suzy's dear twig broom in half. How impressed I was by the grand, cobwebby dollhouse, and how well I understood Miss Suzy's not-quite-contentment there, even after she'd tidied it up, even after she had the nice toy soldiers to mother. She could see the stars from her bed in the little house in the old oak tree, her poor little ransacked house overrun with the quarrelsome red squirrels.
Wonderboy enjoys the book well enough, but Rilla is as enchanted as ever I was. As I write this, I can hear her humming in the next room; she's writing (and I quote) "my own version of Miss Suzy, a-cept it has a chickmunk instead of a squirrel." I'm under orders not to peek until she's ready.
I hope she includes the acorn cups.
Miss Suzy by Miriam Young, illustrated by the great Arnold Lobel. 4oth anniversary edition published by Purple House Press. Who the heck are Purple House Press? Oh my goodness, I just looked them up—I had no idea! They're doing reprints of out-of-print children's classics! They're the folks who brought back Twig! Purple House Press, you are my new best friends!
Tweet
October 4, 2010
We'll Need to Come Up with a Mnemonic for This
Rilla made a solar system's worth of planets out of Sculpey. Their names, she tells me, are: Mom, Dad, Chocolate, Tinky, Pock, Imi, Marshmallow Yellow, and Beauty of Love.
Eat your heart out, NASA.
Tweet
